Engagement rate

The maths is simple: reactions, comments, shares and saves divided by reach. The trouble is that every network counts different things and every tool uses a different denominator, so two numbers from two sources almost never agree. That is why it only makes sense to compare your own figures over time, not your brand against somebody else's benchmark table. Saves and shares are worth more than likes, because they mean someone will come back to the content or pass it on.

Why companies watch it: reach can be bought, engagement cannot. A company page with five thousand followers and five reactions per post is telling you the audience is there on paper but not listening. We saw a B2B page with fewer followers than its competitor and three times the comments, and that was where the enquiries came from. The number alone wins no work, but it shows whether the channel is worth further investment.

How to use it: measure a monthly average rather than individual posts, because one hit distorts everything. Track formats separately, video against photo, carousel against a single image, and after three months you will see what your audience responds to. And ask yourself what you want people to do. A question at the end of a post lifts comments more than any tuning of posting times.

Where it misleads: small pages naturally show higher engagement than large ones, so growing your following almost always pushes the number down. That is not the content getting worse. Prize draws mislead in the same way, inflating the figure without bringing customers. And if you sell to ten companies in Slovakia, five right comments beat a thousand reactions from people who will never buy.

We log engagement once a month alongside one sentence about what we tried differently that month. Without the sentence it is just a number, with it it is a finding. Try it today: look at your five highest engagement posts from the last six months and find what they have in common.